What will you do for the good of your country? Shadow, by K.J. Parker (Book 1 in The Scavenger Trilogy)

 As I indicated earlier in the week, I picked up another K. J. Parker book.  This time, it was Shadow, which is the first book in his Scavenger trilogy.  This one is an odd duck.  Or rather, crow.  I'll explain, to the degree that I can.  The novel is told from two characters' perspectives, one of whom is an amnesiac, and one of whom is a member of a religious order, and he follows orders without a full understanding of context, because he does not need that in order to follow orders, so the reader does not necessarily get the full picture, leading to something disjointed, which is the point, one supposes, but like I said, odd duck.  Or crow.  Crows are a recurring theme, as scavengers and harbingers of the god, Poldarn, who is either the fictional creation of some con artists a few years back and now ironically used as a con again, or a real god using one or both of the aforementioned primary characters as avatars.  Odd.  Let's do this.

Alternate world, perhaps some gods, perhaps including Poldarn, who may or may not be real.  There is an empire ruled mainly from the South, but the action takes place in the North, across a bay.  The emperor is supposedly relatively popular and good, which sounds OK, but there is also a popular and highly skilled general, Cronan.  The empire is stable, but when there is a skilled and popular general, there is a risk that the general might try a coup, so the religious order-- sword-monks-- plot to assassinate Cronan, who is awesome and therefore must die (?!).  The emperor also has a cousin, Tazencius, who would very much like to take over.  He has had his own conflicts with Cronan, but he is plotting with the very untrustworthy mercenary, Feron Amathy, who switches sides like I turn the pages of a book.  Then, there are the raiders, who show up periodically from a Viking-esque set of islands nearby to burn down some towns and steal shit.  Amathy and Tazencius have something going with them.

The book starts with a guy waking up from a head injury, with amnesia.  He is actually a raider, who has been living in the Northern provinces for a while, plotting with Tazencius, fucking around, and generally making a nuisance of himself with everyone.  But, he does not remember any of that.  He just finds himself in the aftermath of a battle, and quickly winds up attached to a woman calling herself Copis, who tells him of a scam she runs, where she and a partner ride around on a cart, and the partner poses as the god, Poldarn.  (Actually, she works for the sword-monks, and she's his minder.)  They fleece the town for whatever they have, ride on, move on.  For the rest of the book, we simply call the amnesiac, "Poldarn," he has prophetic dreams (lots of crows) that suggest Poldarn may be real, and that he really is Poldarn, about whom the tales involve riding around on a cart and destruction following in his wake.

But maybe Poldarn is really the sword-monk.  We just call him, Monach, which means, monk.  His job is to assassinate Cronan because Cronan is too awesome, so patriotism requires that he die.  Um...

Anyway, shenanigans ensue, Cronan dies, amnesiac-Poldarn meets up with the not-Viking raiders, among whom he meets his grandfather, they go home, but after another major injury, complements of Tazencius, he loses his memory of his time as "Poldarn," regaining his earlier memories, but at least Cronan died, so yay for the salvation of the empire.  Right?

This is weird, and I write this liking weird books.  There are two more, so for now, I shall reserve judgment.  From a literary perspective, Parker set a hard task for himself.  When one of your major characters has amnesia (that's not how it works, and yes, that bugs me, but fine, fine, I'll go with it while grumbling because if you insist that it is because of the god, Poldarn, then I'll give you the magical "out"), your knowledge and perspective are limited by your character's knowledge and perspective, but making that work in an alternate world is hard.  And Monach does not really help, because he is just a monk.  OK, a sword-wielding badass monk, and he goes about the world on some assignments, but he is not exactly a political operator, so understanding the ins and outs of the world is not really his thing.  We only get that in drips through "Poldarn's" dreams, which are snapshots.  The abbot of Deymeson, which is the sword-monks' base of operations in the Northern provinces, has some very cursory explanations of the ins and outs, but really, we get the ground's eye view rather than the crow's eye view.

One can read interesting ideas about religious allegories, individualism and group membership, loyalty and treason, and plenty of the anecdotes are just fun, as Parker's are, but here's the issue, from my perspective.

The emperor, we are told, is good.  But Cronan?  He's good too.  He is good as a general, and he seems to be a pretty cool guy.  We even see him, through a Poldarn dream-vision, where Tazencius tries to bait him into a fight, and Cronan does everything possible, first to be nice and not fight, and then to be gentle even when he could smash the shit out of Tazencius.  Point being, Cronan is awesome.

The whole plot hinges on the question of whether or not he is going to try to topple the emperor.  If not, then assassinating him is unquestionably wrong.  If you think he will try to topple the emperor, then you enter that Machiavellian territory of whether or not the evil act serves the greater good, but from the reader's perspective, the ones who want to topple everything are Amathy and Tazencius, not Cronan.

Which means, it's hard to see Monach as anything other than a mindless assassin serving stupid villainy which thinks itself good with no justification.

Do the plotters really think that they are saving the empire by assassinating Cronan?  Do they think themselves patriots, serving the greater good?  Maybe, and we have no real reason to question that, except the utter stupidity of the notion in the context of what we can observe, because Cronan's actions and characterization provide no justification for the belief.

Is that a plot hole?  Honestly, probably, because there are two interpretations.  Either the sword-monks have a stupid plan because they are convinced that General Awesome is going to do something that he will not do, by any reading that we have (keeping in mind our limited information, given the amnesiac perspective), or we are missing something that Parker could/should have written (keeping in mind, again, that the two main characters are an amnesiac and a monk who isn't really told very much).

This is a little frustrating, then, because we can either blame K.J. Parker (Tom Holt, behind the pen name) for failing to give us a reason to believe Cronan will try to take down the emperor, or we can see the sword-monks' plan to assassinate Cronan as stupidly evil.  Parker doesn't tend to write stupid-evil.  Smart?  Yes.  Smart-evil?  Yes.  Stupid-evil?  Not generally.  And yet, the book just requires something more to believe that Cronan would do what the sword-monks are killing him to prevent.  Yeah, bad writing.  (Because otherwise, the sword-monks are just stupid-evil.)

So let's extrapolate/speculate.  Suppose that there were some intercepted communication, or past sleight, or something.  I don't know, I'm not a novelist, I cannot do what Parker usually does.  Suppose there were something.  Maybe the emperor had a secret that Cronan might stumble across, and if that happened, Cronan would take down the emperor.  Then, everything gets destabilized, and the sword-monks don't want that.  I dunno, this ain't my job, it's Parker's.  Anyway, suppose.

At that point, can we justify the assassination of Cronan?  That's really the question.  This is a story about the question of assassination for the greater good.  Worse, preemptive assassination.  If the emperor is the rarity of a good emperor, can you justify assassinating the guy who will take him down, and destabilize the country in a high point?  Contingent on your assumptions.  This is, of course, a classic deontology versus consequentialist question, and in this case, what would it take for me to side against Cronan?  A fuckload.

So let us think.  How much of the history of the empire would have to be constant internal strife and civil war?  How much would there have to be citizens killing and dying?  (Which, as I type it, yeah, they kind of go together.)  And then in contrast, how far above the trend line would the current period have to be?  We get no sense of that, but pose the question.  Then, how certain would you have to be that Cronan would topple everything for, say, personal reasons?  How certain would you have to be that this would return everything to civil war, with Cronan, Tazencius and Amathy burning down the whole place?  Could I come up with something?  Maybe, in consequentialist terms.  I bind myself to no absolutes in this manner, but the bar has to be so fucking high that, um, sorry, not seein' it.  What I see is that the sword-monks are plotting to assassinate the coolest guy around, and generally speaking, cool guys don't topple cool emperors when things are cool.  Part of coolness.

There needs to be a reason.  Can there be?  There can always be a reason.  The world is complex, and everyone has multiple, competing goals and principles.  If you think that there is a thing that can never, under any circumstances, be justified, then consider the absurd scenario of aliens threatening to blow up the Earth if you don't do it.  You may hate yourself, but you'll do it.

But assassinating Cronan?  Um...  not seein' it.  Of course, there are two more books, and Book 1 only provides the perspective of an amnesiac and a monk, so I shall reserve some judgment.

Alison Krauss, "There Is A Reason," from So Long, So Wrong.  It was either this, or a Black Crowes track, but that seemed a little on the nose.